The changes blizzard shoved into wrath classic certainly haven’t helped.
However none of the versions of classic have come close to what they were back in the day and all of them showed a big spike at launch with a steady decline.
But that’s exactly what you would expect for a rerelease, by its nature it’s primarily going to have a front loaded audience who are going to drop off over time.
Classic Era made a surprising comeback. Which I attribute to how badly Blizz fumbled Wrath.
The coping is real
I didn’t say MMOs, it was more than MMOs that were envious of WoW’s playerbase. Most games would kill to maintain that many active players as long as WoW has, even through modern.
WOTLKC isn’t the same WOTLK. I’m genuinely surprised seeing ICC performing worse than TOGC according to ironforge numbers. It could be that people are using their alts less since it’s a longer raid but it doesn’t bode well.
The alt thing will pick up once the 30 hits. TOGC was popular because you could do the raid in 30 minutes and running 4-5 or more alts took about the time ONE or TWO runs can take in ICC. Also, it isn’t as easy for terrabad GDKPs to do where as TOGC was pretty much out geared before you walked into the place with the ICC buff and was generally easy outside of maybe the last boss for most groups.
The 30% will hit, every gdkp on the planet will be full tilt clearing it outside of probably LK where mechanics can certainly screw you if you have 5 brain dead carries… and the alts will be out in full force again. No one wants to buy second bis when bis is just around the corner.
No, Classic players are the toxic ones. Has always been lol. And no, “retail” players have not flooded Classic, retail players are enjoying Dragonflight which is retail. What you mean, are just people that have other interests in WoW but are unhappy with retail.
They remained during the first tier of Cata as well…
I was reading Blizz quarterly reports from 2012 when they still posted sub numbers. They lost a million subs within like 3 months. The falloff was significant towards the end of the expansion.
Curiously, exactly when the 12 month subscription to win free diablo 3 expired…
Which tells you that they could’ve stop playing any time before that, even within Wrath.
The article mentioned a lot of people switched to D3, which was the then highest selling Blizz game.
Blizzard adds a 12 month subscription that awards Tyrael’s mount and Diablo 3 for free for wow players.
They give us the one of the longest tiers ever in the history of WoW to date, and after WoD as well. ICC added in 2009-12-08, lasted until 2010-10-12 with Cata pre-patch, 10 months of ICC… People already stopped playing after clearing things out much earlier than that.
You just don’t have the figures of people who stopped playing before the sub expired because they never publish it.
Right, if we were looking at player involvement metrics not just active subs I bet they’d show a bigger drop off a lot earlier in Cata.
MoP was the start of the garbage retail talent trees we got stuck with up until dragon flight so it still goes down as one of the worst for me.
away from the changes to talents, mop had so much fun things.
actual data.
lol. Wrath rode the coat tails of TBC. but you said the right word - it was stable, meaning it was the first time a WoW xpac had no significant growth. Wrath was the beginning of the end.
TBC rode the coat tails of Vanilla.
It sure did. But the growth curve was still pretty steep.
Well yes, “Classic players” (i.e. people playing Classic) are toxic. Most of them anyway. All the min/maxing, rushing through dungeons, huge focus on gear score etc. are traits which I consider to be toxic.
But the thing is that these behaviours were not present back in 2009 when Wrath was released. The only conclusion I can come up with is that most people who are playing Classic came to it from Retail, because these behaviours are part of the culture of Retail WoW.